I don’t care about Mitt Romney’s big house in La Jolla or his plans to make it much bigger and install a car elevator. He has 18 grandkids, so he needs a lot of space, including for cars. I get that. However, I can’t get with a man who does stuff like this:
Mr. Romney and his wife take regular walks around La Jolla, exchanging pleasantries with fellow strollers and occasionally enforcing the law. A young man in town recalled that Mr. Romney confronted him as he smoked marijuana and drank on the beach last summer, demanding that he stop.
The issue appears to be a recurring nuisance for the Romneys. Mr. Quint, who lives on the waterfront near Mr. Romney, said that a police officer had asked him, on a weekend when the candidate was in town, to report any pot smoking on the beach. The officer explained to him that “your neighbors have complained,” Mr. Quint recalled. “He was pretty clear that it was the Romneys.”
I used to live in Venice Beach, which is a grittier lower-class beach community. But you don’t go up to somebody smoking a joint at the beach and scold them. It’s part of the culture. If any ordinary citizen complained to the cops about someone smoking weed on the beach, they’d be laughed out of town. I mean, if it were on Romney’s property, that would be different.
I agree with his gay neighbor, Randy Clark, who said, “It’s odd that this is where Romney picked a place — it’s so progressive.” Go live somewhere where people aren’t living the beach life. This is Southern California, for chrissakes.
